Getting High In Cars With Boys

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• October 22, 2016

My late teens could best be defined driving aimlessly, smoking blunts around Long Island.  This was wasted time I’ll never see as wasted.  While a lot of it is wash in my memory (alas, I was high), some of the most important conversations of my life happened in the cars of my best boys, getting stoned.

Before I tried stand-up and went on to graduate from Hunter College, I went to Suffolk Community College.  A college, I deeply lamented going to, and was basically forced by my parents decision not to co-sign any loans to go to a more expensive school.  At the time, I had acted like a spoiled, middle class teenager, but I now regard my two years at Suffolk as some of the most crucial shaping years of my life.

It did, however, turn me into a pot head.  Not going away to school meant school full time, and I worked in the nursing home, a depressing job which I handled by making dark and often times flat out insensitive jokes.  We did our fair amount of binge drinking, but the college commuters, myself and three guys from my inner group of friends, looked forward to boredom, because boredom meant getting stoned with three of my best friends.

Well, two of my best friends.  One of these guys and I used to hate each other.  Pretty openly.  Our mutual best friend was really the only reason we ever hung out.  I thought he was a complete moron, and he thought I was a complete bitch, and neither of us were wrong in our assessment of the other.  But one weekend, when no one else was around, we were forced to hang out just the two of us.  We made pot brownies after hours in the office where he worked, and got so high we couldn’t feel our bodies.  Honestly, this remains one of the funniest nights of my life, as we openly mocked the others flaws and laughed a ton. We’ve been best friends ever since.

Alcohol was my drug of choice.  Until I woke up in a pool of my own vomit.  I was in my bed (no idea how I got there), and I remember waking because there was something sticky on my neck.  Then, I noticed the smell.  When I turned on the light, I realized, not only did I vomit in my sleep and not wake up, I didn’t move.  I was laying on my back, and the contents of my stomach spilled over to my neck and the sides of my head.  Vomit was caked in my hair.  Once, I was perplexed how anyone could die choking on their own puke.  On that night, the night before Thanksgiving, I likely narrowly escaped becoming a statistic of teens who OD on alcohol.  To this day, of all the drugs I’ve tried, alcohol is the only one that almost killed me.

It was still the wee hours of the morning, and I did a load of laundry and quietly wept in the shower at the thought of my parents finding me, dead, on Thanksgiving morning.  There had been many nights I drank too much (and many more to come!), and even blacked out, but this was not like those times. This was not a result of having fun.  This was an act of anger and self destruction.  In retrospect, I had been in the throes of a depression, a foreign state of mind to me then.  We were having Thanksgiving dinner at our house, early, to accommodate my working schedule, because I had a shift at the nursing home that evening.  Despite having the worst hangover of my short life, I force fed myself my Mom’s food (which was always delicious).  And when we went around the table to say something we were thankful for, a cheesy ritual I did not care for, I laughed and said, “thankful for being alive and at this dinner.”  This was a comment which came out as cynicism for the hacky tradition, but one that I meant more than anyone at the table knew.

For a while, I stopped drinking altogether.  Then, I only drank beer.  Eventually, I eased back into drinking liquor, and getting absolutely shitfaced, but to this day, I can’t smell Captain Morgan spiced rum without gagging.  And so, pot became my drug of choice.  A drug you simply couldn’t OD on.

It would be unfair of me to ask you not to judge me.  But whatever preconceived notions you have of pot heads, I’d ask you to at least put on hold.  At this time, I had a 4.0 GPA, I was editor in chief of the school paper, took 18 credits or more (I twice took 21 credits, which had to be approved by a guidance counselor), worked part time at the nursing home, worked as a babysitter, exercised regularly, and still smoked pot almost every day.

Every morning when I woke up, I looked forward to driving around with my best boys, getting high.  Weed does give me anxiety, however, which is why I made it a habit of getting my school work done way beforehand so I could enjoy being high without risking a marijuana induced panic attack (in those days, I was riddled with panic attacks, sober or otherwise).  Oddly enough, I was the opposite of a procrastinator because I loved getting high so much.  Often, I berated my friends for procrastinating (which they hated), and made side money writing papers for my stoner friends.

I was not having sex with these boys.  I was not having sex, period.  I was a late bloomer, and still coming out of my ugly duckling phase, and painfully shy when I wasn’t with people I knew very well.  Plus, alcohol was the drug that made me social, pot made me more introspective than I already was.  I seldom drove.  This was because I absolutely loathed driving high.  Paranoia (like if I didn’t do my homework) was too much for me to handle while driving.

We rarely had a destination.  In the warmer months, we’d frequent the beach or a park, but in the colder months, we’d simply drive around, usually hitting up a fast food place.  We had your typical stoner conversations about the universe, and God, and the cosmos.  We all vented about our families, and people whom we had crushes on.  We talked about school; the good, the bad, the straight up bull shit.  We freely talked about our fears, hopes, and dreams.  To this day, I’m unsure there’s ever been a place I felt more safe opening up than in my boys’ cars, passing a blunt around, where holding back never seemed like an option any of us wanted to partake in.  We said stupid things all the fucking time, sure, but this was just laughed at.  There was never a lack of hysterical laughter.  Sometimes, there was no conversation at all.  We’d just sit there, quietly, listening to good music.  There’s a certain bond with people whom you feel comfortable being around without talking.

Getting high in cars with my boys was not only the best form of therapy I’ve ever experienced, it was also the earliest “pitch” sessions I ever had.  Though not yet a stand-up, I was still writing stories on the regular, both for school and for fun.  We all watched a shit ton of television (especially comedy), and made up our own stories and characters based on existing material or our imagination.  My family, though very supportive now, did not understand the fire in my belly that would drive me to an uncertain life in the arts.  Whether or not my boys understood or felt that fire is unknown to me, but in the safe space of the car, under the influence of weed, they not only entertained my mostly ludicrous ideas, they fueled it.  At this time, as many teens do, I felt lost in the world, a stranger to my family, a misfit at school, afraid of my own increasingly melancholy head, but in those hours in the car, where we enjoyed the present, I knew exactly who I was.

These boys, now (arguably) men, remain some of my best friends.  While we no longer drive around getting high for the sake of driving around and getting high, our reunions are never without belly aching laughs, and sometimes, more serious conversations about how we were so much more sure of ourselves back then, when we were just kids, enjoying a journey with no destination, talking nonsense, that was really the furthest thing from nonsense.